


Golden Light

by elle_stone



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Character Turned Into a Ghost, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-06
Updated: 2019-11-06
Packaged: 2021-01-24 12:57:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21338620
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elle_stone/pseuds/elle_stone
Summary: One day in October, Raven and Clarke trudge out into the woods and cast a spell.Two days later, Raven starts seeing a ghost.
Relationships: Clarke Griffin & Raven Reyes, John Murphy & Raven Reyes
Comments: 4
Kudos: 16





	Golden Light

**Author's Note:**

> For idontwantto10 on tumblr, who requested Raven being haunted by Murphy.
> 
> This fic was _heavily_ inspired by my favorite two page spread of the graphic novel _Skim_ by Mariko and Jillian Tamaki. In the novel, the main character Skim and her best friend, teenage witch-practitioners, attempt to summon the spirit of a teenage boy who recently committed suicide. The spell appears not to work, but as they are walking out of frame on the right side of the page, the ghost of the boy is visible behind them on the far left of the opposite page. The novel is not otherwise supernatural, and for perhaps for this reason, I found these pages very moving.

Five weeks into the school year, and three weeks before Halloween, Raven and Clarke trudge out to the middle of the woods and cast a spell. Autumn has come on cold and clear and dry this year. They're wearing their uniform skirts with bare legs and cardigans, but Raven has shoved her sleeves up to her elbows, fine with the goosebumps that shiver along her skin. Underneath their feet, crisp leaves crunch. They don't speak, because Raven is trying to hold the spell in her head, and because if they got to talking, they might start to doubt the soundness of their idea.

They stop at last next to the large, mossy rock by the stream. "I suppose we should hold hands," Clarke says. The spell doesn’t say anything about holding hands, or about standing in a certain way, or about where to look. So they face each other with the toes of their shoes almost touching and reach out for each other's hands. Raven feels a bit like she did in elementary school, playing ring-around-the-rosy, except the ring is small this time and the forest is loud with the chirping of birds and the rustling of the wind through the remaining brilliant leaves.

Clarke lets her say the spell, because she knows it better.

Then they wait. They wait for a long while holding hands, and then a bit longer, sitting side by side on the rock. Raven pokes at a bruise on the right side of her calf. Clarke tilts her head back and watches wisps of thin clouds, like cotton candy, separate from themselves and drift across the pale blue of the sky.

Some time later, they head home.

"What if it had worked?" Raven asks, as she kicks through the fallen leaves at her feet. "What would we have said if he'd shown up?"

Clarke shrugs. "I don't know. Asked him what it's like to be dead, I guess."

Raven sticks her hands in her sweater pockets and shrugs her shoulders up toward her ears. The sky is getting darker now, the air sharper, and for the first time since they set out, she feels unpleasantly cold.

*

John Murphy was a student at the boy's school across the river, so Raven didn't know him well. He died the first weekend of the new school year. The girls at Raven's school held a special assembly, like a memorial, and counselors were brought in to help the students process their grief. Several people cried at the assembly, but Raven simply sat in the back row with Clarke, her knees up against the seat in front of her, and wondered what it meant that she only felt numb.

*

Two days after they try the spell, Raven wakes unusually early, makes herself coffee in the kitchen, and goes to sit out on the back porch, watching the wind blow through the trees and how the gray sky slowly lightens as a precursor to dawn. She's still wearing her pajamas, her blanket wrapped around herself, her feet in fuzzy slippers. She curls her toes through the threadbare fluff of the lining. She wonders if she is the only person in the whole neighborhood already awake.

Probably not. But the yard is eerily quiet and still all the same. The grass is overgrown and covered in leaves her mother has been telling her to rake.

She hates the taste of coffee, which she only drinks because Clarke does and because her mother dislikes the habit, so she sips at it slowly, centers herself instead around the pleasant warm feeling of the mug in her hands. At the edge of the yard, where a line of bushes marks the boundary with the neighbors' land, a slight movement like the rustling of leaves in the wind catches her eye. And she tells herself it's just the wind. But the morning is calm and the rustling is too small, too narrow, too centered in one particular spot. She focuses her eyes on it. Blows a line of bubbles across the surface of her coffee, to cool it, and with the idea that this gesture signifies that she is not afraid.

There is a boy standing in front of the bushes. He is faintly translucent. She can see right through him, his body only the pale outline of a body, when she sets herself to taking him in. 

His presence doesn't scare her as much as she thought it would.

She raises her hand and waves at him, and he smirks at her, and waves back, and disappears.

*

Raven doesn't tell Clarke about the apparition, nor does she interrogate herself on her own silence.

Clarke's locker opens with a stubborn, reverberating clang. She stuffs her books inside it, then starts to tug at a notebook, which is lodged in between some spare loose-leaf pages, trapped against her biology book. People who don't know Clarke well are always surprised to see the disorganized spaces that she keeps. But Raven's known her a long time, and she knows Clarke has an artist's brain: smart but scattered. She struggles a long time with the notebook, and as Raven waits patiently next to her, leaning against the lockers and listening to Clarke curse, she notices him again.

John Murphy, flickering at the far end of the hall.

She really thought that if they conjured him in the woods, he would stay in the woods.

She looks to Clarke, intending to ask her if she sees him too, but she's ripped the notebook free at last, distracted and grinning, and when Raven turns toward the ghost again, he's gone.

*

What is surreal: doodling in her notebook while her English teacher prompts them to discuss their feelings, and Harper goes on about the fragility of life, while Murphy's ghost sits on the windowsill and watches them. She can't try talking to him with all these other people around. She can't even risk looking his way too many times, though she flicks her gaze over whenever she can, just to watch him kicking his heels soundlessly against the wall. Leaves are falling from the trees behind him. Everything dying, or maybe just resting, to be covered in snow, and then in the spring to wake up and live again.

"Raven?" Mrs. Kane says. Raven can tell by her tone that she's been calling her name a few times. "Do you want to share how you've been feeling?"

She sits up straighter, no longer resting her head in her palm, and sets her pen down on the top of her desk with a small, narrow, clack. Clears her throat. "I guess I feel," she says, slowly, looking down at the collage of stars on her notebook page, "that most of us aren't really talking about John. We're just upset that someone our age could die."

"It's okay to feel that way," Mrs. Kane answers. She tilts her head. The lines on her forehead wrinkle with concern. "Is that how you feel, Raven?"

Behind her, Murphy is standing with his hands in his pockets, shaking his head back and forth. 

"I feel," she says, but cannot finish. She's spent more time in the last two days thinking about him, watching him, waiting for him, then she ever did when he was alive, when he was just a name she'd heard repeated now and then, a friend of a friend, one of the boys with the worst reputations at the sister school across the river. No one talks anymore about how he almost got kicked out once, about how he was always pulling stunts that could get him arrested, or killed. No one's repeating rumors about him anymore. His death has become the most and only real thing about him. 

"I feel," she tries again, her voice so faint this time that she has to clear her throat around the words.

Murphy shrugs, and mouths the words _can't help you_, with comic, exaggerated gestures.

She might be the only person in the whole school who isn't worried about her own eventual end, who is hit with the full force of this boy's passing, or how he has not passed, who sees the threadbare farce in all the soft, clean ways that they talk around his death.

"I think Raven's just having a hard time putting all of this into words," Clarke says, into the awkward silence, and reaches out to hold Raven's hand across the aisle. "I think we all are, Mrs. Kane." She smiles, a soft and sad little smile. 

Raven knows that expression well: utter bs, the kind that adults always eat right up.

Murphy jumps up onto Mrs. Kane's desk, right in front of her, gives Raven a little wave, then fades away.

*

They walk home together, she and Murphy, after Raven tells Clarke a couple of half-lies about needing some time alone.

"Are you really doing okay?" Clarke asks, as she pulls her hair free from the straps of her backpack and clicks her locker shut. "Mrs. Kane really put you on the spot today. I figured you just thought the whole thing was dumb—"

"I did." She shifts her weight between her feet. "I do. Everyone pretending to care about Murphy, when, like, none of us even knew him—it’s dumb."

"Yeah." 

Raven keeps flicking her gaze over Clarke's shoulder, watching for luminous shadows in the dissipating crowd of girls in the hall.

"So I'll see you tomorrow?" Clarke asks, and Raven nods and says yeah, and Clarke squeezes her arm before she walks away.

Raven takes the long way home, through the woods. For a while, she's alone, and then she is not. Murphy sticks his hands in his pockets, and keeps pace with her so perfectly that, after a while, she begins to think he might be mocking her. Do ghosts mock? He's still wearing his school uniform, which seems like something of a cosmic joke. She wonders if he's stuck, looking not as he looked at the moment of his death, but as he looked most days of his life: tie knot loose and the top button of his collar undone, black combat boots sticking out from the bottom of his trouser legs.

"Those don't look regulation," Raven points out, gesturing, and Murphy looks at her for the first time in a while.

"Don't turn me in," he answers.

She is surprised, and not surprised all at once, that he can speak. Weirder things, she supposes, have happened than this: a ghost who can talk, in the middle of the woods, in the slow slant of a long and golden afternoon.

"Wouldn't dream of it."

He smiles, not quite a smirk, like maybe they're friends now, and she wonders if this means he will be sticking around.

"Why'd you call for me?" he asks, then, at the same time as she says:

"How did you really die?"

He stops, and she stops too. Above them, a shifting gray cloud drifts over the sun, and the pale stream of light through the trees goes dim. They're just short of the big mossy rock, next to the stream. 

_I don't know. Ask him what it's like to be dead, I guess._

"I guess I just wanted to see if it would work," Raven says. She tugs her sweater sleeves down over her hands. "The spell. Just this idea we had."

Murphy nods. "It did," he says, and points to her. “Your idea.” Then he points to himself. "It didn't."

She considers asking him what the afterlife is like, what he feels now, if he's sad, but she knows he could give no answers that she could truly stand to hear. Those are mysteries for her own future. What she really wants to know is about his past. About who he was, before. 

As they talk, a new sadness slowly fills her, sharp and clear like the October wind, like the slow settling of the day, like the crisp scattering of fallen leaves beneath her feet.


End file.
